‘Oh, oh, oh!’ Bridge wailed joyfully as Aleš turned her round so that his back was to the door now, blotting out the little glass pane, head crammed at an angle, shoulders as wide as the entrance porch. This way, she could hold onto the rail for the door curtain, lean right back and…

‘Ooooooooooooooh.’

It was sensational.

‘I am coming!’ Aleš warned.

‘Not before me,’ she panted as the electric shocks tickled and that whoosh of well-being flooded up inside her. Happy, happy homecoming. So rarely had they come together, at exactly the same time, it was like getting married again. Take that, Fantasy Ash. I love my husband!

‘Something strange is between my legs!’ Aleš wailed in a strangled voice.

‘Telling me!’ she groaned and shuddered appreciatively. ‘Ten inches of it’s inside me.’

‘Aghhhhhh!’

With fairground-ride giddiness, Bridge felt herself free-falling several inches through the air as Aleš almost dropped her.

‘Kurwa! Arghhh!’

‘What’s wrong?’ She clung on, still half-coming, heart hammering as her body went into meltdown.

‘Something against my balls. Feel it, quick. Like it bugger me! Kurwa!’ He shrugged her legs urgently off his shoulders and pulled them round his waist. In moments of high excitement, Aleš’s kinkier demands were often lost in translation – and he could be quite kinky – so Bridge tried to ride this, body still crackling and fizzing like popping candy, doing what he wanted and reaching around to finger his balls and anus.

They closed around a tightly rolled pamphlet. ‘What the…?’

Aleš groaned as she swiftly removed it before taking a look.

The Compton Villages Parish Magazine, January Edition ran with the headline Church Tower Under Risk of Collapse After Lead Theft Reveals Deathwatch Beetle. Brian Hicks and his wife Chris distributed the little booklet around all the local houses on the first of each month without fail, rolling it up neatly to post it through the Mazurs’ letterbox.

‘I think you’ve just been buggered by the Chairman of the Parish Council, my darling,’ Bridge told him, feeling his tower subside in sympathy with the beetle-infested church. ‘Would you like a cup of tea and an almond biscuit to get over the shock?’

*

Thinks happy thoughts, think happy thoughts! Pax could feel it, the tumour of rage multiplying ferociously, dividing and multiplying again like cells. She was holding a hose to wash mud off hooves as the herd came in from the fields, but longed to drench Luca in its icy water instead.

‘You’ve missed that near hind,’ he told her, passing behind with Margaret, the sourest-faced of the broodmares who looked almost as pissed off as Pax felt.

‘The girls never usually get their legs hosed,’ she said.

‘They do now.’

Think happy thoughts! She pressed the hose trigger hard, the water pressure so high it snaked out of her frozen fingers, drenching her own leg, not doe-eyed Barbara’s.

‘Best check her frogs when you pick her feet out, yes?’ Luca passed behind her again, heading off to grab Shirley from the tie-ring.